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#Paelstine / When 'progressive' politics masks colonial hierarchies…
Israeli-Palestinian graduate student Jiwara Badr confronts Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians in a startling essay he titled “Let's talk about this village that you're so eager to burn”.
It opens with Badr's firsthand experience in #Jerusalem (al-Quds), where he hears drunk bar patrons enthusiastically singing "Let Your Village Burn" - a moment that crystallizes what he sees as mainstream Israeli attitudes toward Palestinian communities. This scene is immediately juxtaposed with his late-night encounter with Palestinian workers repairing streets in Tel Aviv, highlighting the stark irony at the heart of his argument: the same people some Israelis gleefully speak of harming are essential to building and maintaining Israeli society.
The echoes of Kristallnacht in these calls for burning villages are chilling, but equally striking is Badr's critique of Israel's liberal left.
[…] Don't misunderstand me. I don't operate on the principle of 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' To the other part of the nation, the 'Kaplanists,' champions of democracy and supporters of the regular protests, I have a few words for you too. You who stood in the squares for almost two full years in freezing cold and scorching heat, in rain and sun, waving flags and shouting slogans empty of any real content, listen carefully to what I have to say.
Put aside your naive fantasies about 'the good old Israel.' Because we, the Arabs - just like all those you love to call 'Bibists' with obvious contempt - have no intention of allowing you to 'restore former glory.' For you, 'Jewish and democratic state' is just another worn-out slogan; for us, it's one big paradox - another mechanism of oppression disguised as fake 'equality.' And if you don't align with us and internalize the new political reality, where your status is losing height, don't expect to see us standing behind you and certainly not beside you - not in Kaplan Square and not in Neve Shalom.
The equation is very simple: if you're not with us, we're not with you.
———
This is a powerful commentary that resonates deeply with me as a Jewish Israeli. The truth is that Israel's left was comfortably [part of the] establishment until it found itself on the outside. It never formed genuine partnerships with most Israelis, let alone with Palestinians. Instead, it maintained a position of privileged criticism while benefiting from the very systems it claimed to oppose… being so afraid to speak out, let alone demonstrate against the genocide in Gaza, is really the end of the story for Israel’s left in that respect (or whatever is left of it).
@israel
@palestine
#IsraelOccupation
#IsraelWarCrimes
#GazaGenocide
[cont’d] What’s the problem with Israel’s left?
Israel’s left is still perceived to be predominantly made of Israelis of Eastern European heritage, though progressives are not exclusively that. One can go back to the 1990׳s “Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition” (הקרן המזרחית הדמוקרטית) for instance, or the 1970’s Israeli Black Panthers before that.
As Aziza Khazzoom analyzed this brilliantly in “Shifting Ethnic Boundaries and Inequality in Israel, Or: How the Polish Peddler Became a German Intellectual”, published by Stanford University Press in 2008, European Jewish identity was constructed as "modern" and "enlightened" against an imagined "traditional" and "backward" Mizrahi other. It's a fascinating paradox: the same Polish Jewish immigrants who were viewed as uncouth peddlers in Europe de-orientalized themselves in Palestine by positioning themselves as representatives of European progress. This required creating a new "Orient" within Israel itself, made up of Jews from Arab and Muslim countries.
Israel's left, rooted in this Labor Zionist tradition, internalized this framework so deeply that even their progressive politics remained trapped within it. While they could critique the occupation of Palestinians or advocate for social justice in abstract terms borrowed from the West, they remained largely blind to how they themselves perpetuated internal hierarchies. Their cultural capital wasn't just about wealth or political power - it was about claiming a monopoly on what it meant to be "modern" and "democratic," while treating Mizrahi political expressions as inherently suspect, or if you used to read #Haaretz back in the day, "primitive."
The irony is that this positioning helped create the very political dynamics they now decry. By treating Mizrahi Jews as objects of enlightenment rather than equal partners in building Israeli society, they contributed to their own eventual political marginalization while maintaining a posture of moral superiority. By the way, professor Sergio Della Pergola showed that there was no meaningful difference in the demographics of migrants from Eastern Europe and North Africa who came to Palestine after 1948 in any respect (income, education or profession). The economical gap that appeared in the 1960’s onward was a direct consequence of a policy of marginalization (or peripheralization) of Arab jews which gave Eastern Europeans a clear advantage.
Talking about Ashkenazi “enlightenment”, It’s worth mentioning that Israel’s leaders, many of which are wanted war criminals, are still mostly of Eastern European heritage, including Netanyahu (Polish), #Gallant (Polish), and #Herzog (Polish).